Perfume Lovers London Meet-Up: "An Evening Of Leather", With More Leather Scents Than You Can Crack A Whip At...

Yes, some weeks before the second meeting of the Perfume Lovers London group at the New Cavendish Club, the upcoming talk had already acquired its snigger-worthy moniker of the "Leather Event". Some of us - well, speaking for myself, anyway - were keenly anticipating an evening of leather-themed double entendres and backhanded references to whips, canes, flagellation and tight outfits involving sturdy yet stretchy fabrics. Oh, and some perfumes that smelt of leather, maybe...

Before I had even made it down to London, I got myself into character on the self-harming front: for the train gave a sudden and violent lurch as it was nearing Euston, and I fell hard against the plastic arm of a seat, badly bruising my leg. I can't say I derived the remotest sensation of pleasure from this injury, and was in my hotel room slathering arnica on a a purple area the size of a small republic when I picked up a message from Katie Puckrik. She suggested meeting up before the talk - this time at a Lebanese restaurant near the venue. In a leatherette booth (putting us in the mood for the night's theme!) we exchanged news over a plate of falafel and - in a Middle Eastern take on petits fours - dainty, bite-size morsels of baklava.

Suitably refuelled, we headed down to Marble Arch tube station to rendez-vous with Tara of Olfactorias Travels, and the three of us made our (slightly circuitous) way to the club - I persist in thinking it is in a crescent of smart townhouses set back from the main road, instead of on the corner of the next block. Third time unerring, maybe.

The event was held in the same ornate yet cosy room as in January, and Lila Das Gupta and Grant Osborne greeted everyone warmly, proffering the usual fine drop of white wine (or juice alternative for the health-conscious or anyone mad enough to drive into Central London). It was great to see Tara and Nick again, also the Candy Perfume Boy - by our reckoning, we had not met since a Basenotes event in the summer of 2008!

Lila kicked off her talk with a brief overview of the history of perfume and its link to the glove industry. The frank tone of the evening was set early on, when our host explained how leather came to be perfumed in order to mask the odour of the urine - and sometimes faeces - used in tanning.

From here it was a short hop to the fashion for gratuitously perfumed gloves: technology advances had eliminated the need for a pleasant odorant in the manufacturing process, but by now perfumed leather had become firmly associated in people's minds with luxury goods. As well as scented gloves - of which Queen Elizabeth I owned enough pairs to rival Imelda Marcos's shoe collection, apparently - Lila cited the example of Russian jewellers wrapping precious stones in perfumed leather.

To round off this first section of the talk, we were invited to smell a couple of iconic "Historical Leathers": Knize 10 and Chanel Cuir de Russie. The former reminded me of Pledge furniture polish, while others in the group got insect repellent, and Katie pronounced it to be "sharp on my nose hairs".

When the discussion turned to Cuir de Russie, the subject of castoreum came up - and out of beavers - strictly in a dietary context, I hasten to add. For not only is the leather note in Cuir de Russie derived from birch tar, but the scent also contains castoreum from Siberian beavers who ate birch bark, infusing their musky secretions with birch by the back door, as it were - or the back passage, you might even say...

Lila also explained the connection between early leather (and tobacco) scents and female emancipation / financial independence. At this point Grant - who, armed only with his iPad, did a sterling job as ever in charge of visual aids - showed us a photo of a besuited Ann Scott-James, one of Britain's first female career journalists.

In the next section of the talk ("Cheap and Cheerful Leathers"), we took part in a fun blind test, to see if we could distinguish between the bargain basement perfume, Dana English Leather, and the vastly more expensive niche offering, L T Piver Cuir. Reader, I could! I didn't really like either to be honest, but the cheapie cologne was the more tolerable of the two. Then, after we had enjoyed a couple of cheesy period TV ads, including a raunchy and sexist one for English Leather from the 60s, Lila introduced us to her special guest, petite perfumer Liz Moores, who is releasing a leather scent of her own later this year.

Liz passed around some raw materials for us to sniff which are used to create different leather effects, starting with a birch tar that smelt like creosote, quinoline (a curious hybrid word fashioned from "crinoline" and "quinine") that had a green and aromatic facet, and suederol, which sounds like the stuff cheap patchwork handbags on a market stall might be made of. It was in fact my favourite ingredient of the three, and is sprayed by Jaguar in their new cars, presumably to enhance their naturally luxurious new car smell yet further!

Next up, Lila invited us to sample some leather scents in the other categories she had devised. So following on from "Historical" and "Cheap and Cheerful", we smelt examples from "The Middle Ground" (PG Cuir d'Iris, Parfum D'Empire Cuir Ottoman), "Beautifully Blended" (EL Azuree, Mona di Orio Vanille), "Soft Suedes" (Bottega Veneta), and "Sex God" (Dior Leather Oud). So as not to overface us, Lila omitted to circulate any scents from the "Full-On" (Mona di Orio Cuir!) or "Maverick" categories (Tauer Lonestar Memories!, L'Artisan Dzing! - which comes with integral exclamation mark!). However, some of us dared to dabble in these during the milling around part of the evening after the talk proper was over.

Grant also took advantage of our gathering to announce the results of the Basenotes Reader Awards in a "pop-up ceremony", and there was much hilarity over the Creed nominations in no fewer than three categories, and Royal Oud's subsequent triumph as Best Men's Fragrance of 2011. Grant agreed with my suggestion that Creed is the Manchester United of the niche perfume world, by which I meant that it could be a lazy default choice for those who are unfamiliar with the many options out there.

Mona di Orio won two awards (Best Perfumer and Best Perfume House), and Lila read out a touching letter from Mona's business partner, saying how much it would have meant to her if she had lived to see her work receive these accolades.

As well as complimentary samples of three of the award-winning scents (Bottega Veneta, Terre d'Hermes and Royal Oud itself), we were all given a free leather bracelet to make our leather experience complete! Lila had explained at the start of the talk that thanks to its porous surface, leather is particularly good at absorbing odour molecules, and we were encouraged to spray our bracelets with our favourite leather scent of the night. This inevitably prompted paroxysms of indecision on the part of some delegates, on a scale known only to Travalo owners, who must similarly make up their minds which fragrance in their collection they love enough to commit to this monogamous receptacle.

At one point during the evening, Lila "outed" me as having expressed a reluctance to come along in the first place. This is because I am not much of a leather fan really, give or take the odd exception like Cuir de Lancome, L'Agent by L'Agent Provocateur and Sonia Rykiel Woman (though the latter two weren't featured). I can truthfully say that I didn't discover any new leather scents to love, despite being introduced to so many in this single, intensive session. I had fun trying, though!

And unexpectedly, there was also the chance to test out the winners of the Basenotes awards. I spritzed on original Angel (which decomposed on my skin before my very nose! - Katie remarked that it smelt as though I needed to take a shower), Illmasqua Freak (which smelt more like Angel on me than the real deal), and Jennifer Aniston (a clean-smelling musky jasmine, which - had I applied it more liberally - might have made me smell as though I had taken the shower Katie recommended, along similar lines to our perfumed leather from earlier : - ) ).

So, thanks are due to Lila and Grant for a whip-crackingly good night, which was lively to the point of rumbustious! We submitted our noses to a right birching from more leather variants than you can shake a stick at, and blow me if my favourite discovery of the night may turn out to be a beachy celebrity scent. And definitely would do if regular application could give me her artlessly tousled, perfectly highlighted mane.

Photo of whip from Alaskan Dude via Wikimedia Commons, photo of glove from Magnus Manske via Wikimedia Commons, photo of beaver via Wikimedia Commons, Jennifer Aniston perfume from glamfull.com, other photos (Maroush restaurant, Lila with some of the group, Katie Puckrik talking to Liz Moores, the Candy Perfume Boy sniffing his bracelet - that isn't facial hair, though you might be forgiven for thinking so - and Tara) my own.

Basenotes Mini-Meet Up And That Old "Skin Chemistry" Chestnut

As regular readers know, I travel extensively with my work - indeed I am off to Germany again in a couple of hours - so there will be the usual posting break on Bonkers. One of the perks of all this business travel has been the chance to meet some of my virtual perfumista friends in person: in Germany, Switzerland and the USA so far. But recently it came to my attention that there was another perfumista on my doorstep in Stafford! He contacted me through the Basenotes forum (where he goes by the name of Ralph), and we met for coffee on Saturday. We chose the steps of the art gallery as our meeting point: I said I would be carrying a bright orange Ormonde Jayne bag(!), but thanks to our highly attuned powers of fellow fumehead detection we recognised each other instinctively without the aid of props. : - )

It was a bright, sunny day, and we headed for Starbuck's round the corner, where we whiled away a pleasant couple of hours sitting outside in the main shopping thoroughfare. As is the way with these things, we got straight down to business and it wasn't long before the table was covered with bottles, decants and vials - and the entire smellable length of our arms in various scents - much to the bemusement of the people at adjacent tables.

Ralph had brought along a number of samples for me to test blind and try to identify, a fun challenge at which I failed dismally. Two of these were Montale Black Oud and L'Etat Libre d'Orange Fat Electrician - the oud note smelled familiar, but I couldn't put a name to it(!), though I could at least pick out the vetiver in the sublimely silly Fat Electrician.

Meanwhile, I was keen for Ralph to try three perfumes that I thought were on the turn or completely off: a mini of Jo Malone Lime Basil Mandarin, one of The Different Company Osmanthus, and a bottle of Floris Night Scented Jasmine. The Jo Malone we decided was not off after all, just unpleasantly basil-y! My mini was probably a bit long in the tooth, and it is possible that the basil had become more pronounced over time, but we concluded that the main problem was that it was simply not very nice to start with.

The tests with the Night Scented Jasmine and the Osmanthus were most illuminating. I had given up on the former because it had an oily, alcohol-y smell, and on the latter because of a synthetic, plasticky note. We conducted a side-by-side test, which had the added variable of male versus female skin.

To our surprise, on Ralph's skin both perfumes positively bloomed - the Night Scented Jasmine was a sumptuous floral, while the Osmanthus was fresh and fruity. Needless to say, they were both rehomed immediately. They were later joined by my albatross bottle of Juicy Couture Dirty English, which was like Caron Yatagan on me, but much softer on Ralph's skin. Indeed, given his leaning towards powerhouse fragrances like Aramis and Kouros, it wouldn't have mattered if it had smelt more strongly of Yatagan on him!

So that was all very interesting and satisfactory. After two rounds of drinks at Starbuck's, we sat on a shady bench in the churchyard of St Mary's for a little while, before grabbing a bite to eat in the Soup Kitchen, Stafford's oldest tea rooms, dating back to the 16th century. I had their last portion of soup, while Ralph opted for a sandwich, followed by a cream tea split between two. Well, just a single scone to be precise, because the ones from the Soup Kitchen are noted for being monstrous, tottering Towers of Pisa. We sat by the window upstairs in a relatively secluded spot, where we could carry on the serious business of spritzing and sniffing without raising too many eyebrows.

Four hours simply sped by, and then it was time for me to do some errands in town before the shops closed. Oh, and special commendation is due to Ralph for his tea assembly skills at Starbuck's. As reported in past posts, I am very particular about how my tea comes, and my worst nightmare is a barista pre-adding copious amounts of milk before the tea bag has had a chance to brew; sometimes up to 50% of the liquid content has been cold - or, bizarrely, hot - milk in tea made for me by cafe staff. Ralph, on the other hand, brought me a mug with a tea bag floating in it, plus a small measure of cold milk on the side. Result!

Now, I have just been looking at Basenotes to see if there is a search facility that would enable members to find others based in the same town. I tried inputting "Stafford", but the first hits were for Lee Stafford, the celebrity hairdresser, so I sense that this very specific functionality I have in mind may need more work. I did note that there are currently 53,304 members of the site, with approximately one in ten active (5,162).

So you never know...chances are, there's a Basenoter living near you too!


Photo of Soup Kitchen from stafford-towncentre.co.uk, photo of basenotes logo from basenotes.net, photo of Floris scent from florislondon.com, photo of St Mary's from staffordtown.co.uk, photo of Starbuck's mug from blog.epromos.com.

Miller Harris L'Air de Rien: Not Nothing, But Nothing To Be Scared Of

The other day, Bloody Frida received a swap parcel from me, prompting her to conduct a preppy fragrance throwdown between the teeny remnants of vintage Lauren I sent her and the modern variety. She illustrated the post with a photograph showing the eclectic set of items I had put in the package, including a "comedy haberdashery decoy" of some ceramic buttons, designed to bamboozle our respective draconian postal authorities.

Then yesterday, I received Bloody Frida's parcel to me. She entrusted her other half, known on these boards as MOTH, with the delicate and dangerous task of posting my package. Before being despatched to the post office, MOTH was briefed to deploy a similar haberdashery decoy strategy, and to mark the contents as "wool". In the event, MOTH was so conscientious in the execution of his fraught mission that he went one better, and wrote "knitted hat" on the customs label.

So as I say, yesterday the knitted hat arrived, along with the trio of fine fragrances that were the real and covert focus of the swap. To be fair, the knitted hat is a bit of a work-in-progress still - not totally off the drawing board you could say - but it is a veritable vision of woolly wonder, fashioned in exactly my preferred shades of sludgy blue and brown.

As for the perfumes, Bloody Frida enclosed the two we had discussed, Tauer's Carillon pour un Ange and Miller Harris L'Air de Rien, and thoughtfully added a decant of Agent Provocateur, which was on my MUA wish list! Now I haven't got round to retesting the Tauer - I wasn't too struck on it at (the) Scent Bar in December, but felt it merited a retrial. However, I wore the Miller Harris all day yesterday...

Of the two, this was the one I was most fearful of trying again. It is the scent created by Lyn Harris (whom I always have to remember to spell with one "n") for Jane Birkin, sixties boho wild child, singer / muse of Serge Gainsbourg, and face of the eponymous Hermes bag. Prior to the development of L'Air de Rien, Jane Birkin had rejected all fragrant materials except potpourri, associating perfume properly speaking with blowsy florals worn by "heady, dark-haired women".

She goes on to explain in an interview with UK Vogue that notes "like hyacinth, tuberose and lily-of-the-valley made me vomit when they were enclosed in a bottle". Okay, I hear what she is saying, but potpourri? In my experience potpourri can be very hit or miss, and much of it is overpowering in a stifling Yankee candle kind of way. JM Pomegranate Noir I am looking at you... So I would like to know where JB got her particular blend and what was in it. I did try googling "Jane Birkin potpourri", but came up instead with a video of her singing in France last year.

Be that as it may, what Jane Birkin did want L'Air de Rien to smell of - which she reckoned would be "much more me" - was "a little of my brother's hair, my father's pipe, floor polish, empty chest of drawers, old forgotten houses." Now interestingly, her brother Andrew Birkin wrote the screenplay for the film of the book "Perfume", so it is to be hoped that his hair didn't smell of any of the ghoulish scents featured in that movie. Glancing at these notes from Lucky Scent, mercifully it would appear not - I see no dead girls listed here.

Notes: French oak moss, Tunisian neroli, sweet musk, amber and vanilla

That said, musk is down as one of the notes, and some reviewers, notably Angela of Now Smell This, have interpreted this animalistic odour in L'Air de Rien specifically as civet. Civet, as some readers may know, is my Room 101 of perfumery notes. I found it ironic that a scent reported to contain my most loathed fragrance ingredient could have the effrontery to call itself: "The appearance of nothing". For not for nothing am I known on Basenotes as "VM I hate civet". But always in the back of my mind is the niggling fact that I smelt L'Air de Rien on Danielle Osborne, aka Mrs Basenotes, back in the summer of 2009 at a Basenotes sniffing event, and it was really something on her. Not in the least offensive. A quiet animalic blur, perfectly blended with her skin. So I knew that one day I would have to square up to a rematch, and yesterday was the day.

Well, to my immense surprise I liked it immediately I sprayed it on. It had a granular texture like Eau Duelle, Habit Rouge EDT and the grandma of grit, Guerlain Sous Le Vent, but not excessively so. It was vaguely animalic, but nowhere near the levels of Jicky, where the unhappy marriage of civet with lavender reminds me unpleasantly of lavatory freshener. There was a whisper of moss and/or patchouli, which was probably as close as I got to "old forgotten houses" and their furniture. It had the warm vanillic quality I love so much in Eau Duelle, though in a much quieter register. It was like unwashed skin, but I'd like to think it actually smelt no worse than I do on those far too frequent occasions when I sit at the computer all day in my dressing gown, and come 6 o'clock decide that it is hardly worth getting washed or dressed anymore - or not on that day, at least.

Okay, maybe there was the merest suggestion of carnal filth, but not at antisocial levels. Musc Ravageur is more of a filth foghorn in that regard. A sweet filth foghorn. And I do like Musc Rav, but I don't think I would wear it outside the home, whereas I am actively planning to wear L'Air de Rien to imminent social events. If anyone asks me what I am wearing (and they never do) I can always say: "Oh, it is one of those 'barely there' scents", which I could go on to justify with the translation of the name.

Moreover, L'Air de Rien is, all things considered, not exactly like anything I have ever smelt. Which I guess the name also hints at - it has the "air of nothing" I have encountered before. I may also have to consider changing my Basenotes name from "VM I hate civet" to "VM I used to hate civet with a vengeance, but now I am prepared evaluate each case on its own merits". That's assuming there IS civet in there, which is by no means certain.

Now I hope I am not being overly optimistic about L'Air de Rien's social acceptability here, for it didn't go down too well with Mr Bonkers. He did his asking me to leave the room trick again, and described it as an "eye-stinger". If you remember, the only perfume I own which received a favourable reception from him was SJP Lovely, so I was probably always going to be on a "hiding to nothing" with something containing even suspected civet in trace amounts that don't appear to bother my hyperosmic nasal receptors. I told Mr Bonkers how the scent conjured up unwashed body parts and explained the link with Jane Birkin, and all he said was: "Who's he?" My follow up reference to 1970s school discos and the way they always played "Je T'Aime" as the smoochy number at the end of the night also fell on uncomprehending ears.

This response has definitely confirmed me in my intention to wear L'Air de Rien exclusively outside the home. I am used to Mr Bonkers ridiculing and stonewalling me over my perfume choices, and his attitude, like the scent itself, is - to quote Adam Ant - "nothing to be scared of".

Oh, look at that sweater Jane Birkin is wearing in the picture below! I know Bloody Frida said the wool she sent me was only sock gauge, but I wonder....






Photo of L'Air de Rien from Lucky Scent website, photo of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg from frogsmoke.com, photo of monolith of writhing bodies from picasaweb.google.com, photo of Je t'aime record from vasiliska.com, photo of Jane Birkin nowadays from Wikimedia Commons, other photos my own.